On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joshua Cude wrote: > > Most of those things are tools, and I believe in them like I believe in >> hammers. But no matter how much you believe in hammers, it doesn't mean you >> can build a house. >> > > Let me spell out what you believe. You may not agree, but here are the > implications of what you are saying. > > You believe that a group of roughly 2,000 highly qualified professional > scientists who have repeatedly measured an effect at high signal to noise > ratios are wrong. Every one of them was wrong, in ever single instance. If > even one was right, that would make cold fusion real. > Well, yes of course (except I don't agree with the high signal-to-noise, considering the results are mostly noise). That is is a simple implication. Not all their measurements are wrong, but if in my judgement, as in the judgement of most scientists, cold fusion experiments are not measuring heat from nuclear reactions, then according to that judgement, anyone who interprets their measurements as evidence of heat from nuclear reactions are making an incorrect interpretation. > > Taken as a group, there is no chance that such a large randomly selected > group could are all wrong for 22 years. That's simply preposterous. First, because it is hardly a randomly selected group. It is a group selected on the basis of their making positive cold fusion measurements. It's like selecting 1000 people who answered 2+2=5 on a test out a several million say, and saying there is no chance they are all wrong. If you select scientists at random, they will not all interpret cold fusion experiments as nuclear phenomena. Secondly, for cold fusion to be right, requires a far larger group of scientists to be wrong. Thirdly, there are precedents for large groups of scientists being wrong. Before Einstein, all scientists were wrong about time intervals being independent of reference frame. Before Planck, all scientists were wrong about atoms absorbing or emitting radiation on a continuum. Relativity and QM are admittedly a little different, but there are also very close parallels with which I am sure you are familiar: N-rays and polywater. I know you see these as very different as well, but for the purpose of this argument, in fact, the parallel is very good. There were 200 publications on N-rays, and 450 or so on polywater (over about 12 years). Cold fusion is bigger than either, with a little more than twice the publications than polywater, but then it's a more subtle measurement -- more difficult to disprove, and the implications of the phenomenon are far greater, therefore attracting more attention. The polywater people could have said it's not like N-rays because there are twice as many papers, and twice as many scientists, but in fact it was like N-rays. And if you can get 450 papers, with more than 100 in one year, with the authors all wrong, every single one of them, it's not a stretch to imagine twice (or even 10 times) that if an unequivocal debunking hadn't come along. This sort of delusional science is not a random process. And then of course there are fields that go on for many more decades that are considered wrong by most scientists. Fields like homeopathy and "straight" chiropractic are a century old, and in the judgement of many, they are all wrong. Homeopathy advocates sometimes even sound like cold fusion advocates. Listen to this from the Guardian in 2010: "By the end of 2009, 142 randomised control trials (the gold standard in medical research) comparing homeopathy with placebo or conventional treatment had been published in peer-reviewed journals – 74 were able to draw firm conclusions: 63 were positive for homeopathy and 11 were negative. Five major systematic reviews have also been carried out to analyse the balance of evidence from RCTs of homeopathy – four were positive (Kleijnen et al; Linde et al; Linde et al; Cucherat et al) and one was negative (Shang et al)." If even one of those were right, homeopathy would be real. > In order for cold fusion to be wrong, every single one of these people would have to be making drastic errors repeatedly, for 22 years. I don't know about drastic errors, but certainly repeated errors of interpretation. You are saying that Jalbert, these experts, the people at TAMU and experts > at roughly a hundred other institutions all thought they measured tritium, > but they were all wrong. You are saying that you know more about tritium > than they do, and you are sure they are wrong. You don't have to have a > reason -- you just know. Remember: if even one tritium result is real, or > one example of heat beyond the limits of chemistry, that means cold fusion > is real, and you are wrong. > What I know doesn't matter, but it is very clear that most people who know as much about tritium as your stars, don't believe the measurements, or at least don't believe they come from cold fusion. And judging from the scatter in the data by orders of magnitude (10^10 if I remember), from the fact that the highest values came from BARC within weeks of the press conference (for what is supposed to be a very difficult experiment), that they have gotten smaller over the years, and don't come close to accounting for the measured heat, it is reasonable to conclude that they do not provide enough evidence to suggest nuclear reactions at room temperature in benchtop experiments create measurable heat. > What you saying boils down to an arrogant, unfounded, ignorant assertion > that widespread replication does not mean anything; that peer-review and > high signal to noise results mean nothing. That forces the conclusion that > the experimental does not work. The scientific method does not work. If that > were true, we would still be living in caves. > > That is an odd notion of the scientific method. Scientists don't consider the likelihood that a large group of deluded scientists might form, or of how many can or can't be wrong. Non-scientists of course have to consider expert consensus to make judgements or policy about science, but then they consider the consensus of experts, not the consensus of believers. Scientists however look at the results, not at the scientist, and they make judgements based on whether they think the *results* taken together suggest one interpretation or another. Most scientists judge cold fusion to be wrong. You may think they are forsaking the scientific method in making this judgement, but as I've argued before, in the last 20 years, progress in science has kept pace by scientists who reject cold fusion, and no progress to speak of has been made by scientists who embrace cold fusion. So, I'm gonna say that the scientists who reject it are using a better method.
